RoPieee beta release with touchscreen support
Hi,
I’m happy to announce the availability of the first beta image with touchscreen support. With ‘touchscreen support’ I mean support for the original Raspberry Pi Foundation 7 inch display.
So what will you get? RoPieee as usual, but on top of that a touch sensitive UI to control the RoPieee/Roon endpoint with the usual controls. The interface is fairly minimal at this point with stuff missing (the playing/remain time being the most obvious one), but I wanted to get a few other testers on the basic stuff before I continue. A simple screensaver is implemented as well: after 10 minutes inactivity of the endpoint (as in: not playing audio) it will blank.
What do you need to do? Not much more than usual with RoPieee. Just insert the SD card, wait for a few minutes. You can check if the installation process is completed by either checking RoPieee’s web page (ropieee.local), or wait for the green led to blink with a 1s interval. The installation process itself will take longer than usual, as RoPieee is fetching the graphical stack upon detection of a touchscreen. So to be clear: touchscreen detection only works at installation time. So applying a touchscreen to an already running RoPieee will not work.
The next thing that you need to do is configure the touchscreen on RoPieee’s web page. For this there are 2 parameters: first the orientation (depending on how you’ve constructed things the screen can be ‘upside down’), second the Roon zone which is represented by the RoPieee. Finally, you need to enable the 'RoPieee Remote Control 'extension in Roon itself (go to ‘Settings --> Extensions’ and enable it). If all went well you can now control your RoPieee endpoint from the touchscreen!
Disclaimer: this is beta software. It has only been tested on a Raspberry Pi 3.
Where to go from here? I know there’s quite some functionality missing. So please don’t flood this thread with a list of features that you’re missing, because I’m already missing a lot myself 
But first things first. I’m interested what people think of it in general by actually playing with it.
Download link: here
Let’s play!